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| Sleep Duration | Further sleep deprivation studies have shown that when eight-hour sleepers are limited to four hours of sleep, their immune systems are compromised.
Nonetheless, these studies involved a severe reduction of sleep (50% loss of normal sleep) and therefore may not apply to the smaller reductions in sleep that we typically experience in daily life. Besides, these findings on immune suppression may not be clinically meaningful since no one has shown that they actually cause disease.
To have the same effects on immune functioning, stress has also been shown. Actually, it is possible that the stress of the experiment may be responsible for these effects instead of sleep loss itself.
A large-scale study, conducted by scientists, casts significant doubt on the belief that we need to sleep eight hours per night to stay healthy.
Consequently, they studied over a million adults of all ages to determine the relationship between sleep duration and mortality.
Their outcomes showed that people who slept seven hours per night had the lowest death rates over a six-year period, while people who slept eight or more hours had a greater risk of dying over the same period.
In effect, the greater the sleep duration beyond eight hours per night, the greater the death rate and people who only slept five hours per night lived longer than those who slept eight or more.
These discovers suggest that seven hours of sleep may be the ideal sleep length in terms of longevity and that sleep may be like food: too little or too much is unhealthy, but the optimal amount may help us to live longer.
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